Multimedia contact centers allow agents to deal with queries, complaints or other issues raised by remote users (referred to herein as “customers”, irrespective of whether they are actually buying products or services from the call center organisation) who contact the call center by live telephone call or video call, or by message, such as leaving voicemail, sending email, submitting a web form, sending a mobile telephony text message, and the like.
In searching for increased efficiency it is common to automate responses where possible, to filter calls through interactive voice response systems, to encourage callers to send or leave messages, or to encourage customers to visit a website. A primary reason for this is that while processing power and speed is increasing, enabling increased automation, the necessity for live agents to handle communications is at times crucial. It is the agents themselves whose resources can be most valuable to the contact center, and increasing the efficiency of the agents' work is always desirable.
Ironically, when resources are scarce and customers become dissatisfied with the service level provided by the call center, they will often unwittingly exacerbate the scarcity of resources by sending emails, submitting web forms, leaving voicemail messages and calling the center. Each such communication, with effectively the same content, sent by the same sender, has to be dealt with or marked as completed, all of which can consume agent resources. This invention has application in increasing the efficiency with which agents can respond to messages for handling at the call center.
Similarly, there can be large numbers of similar requests from different customers, each of which needs to be dealt with, and the present invention has application in increasing the efficiency of handling such communications.
Such problems are not confined to contact centers. Regular individual users of email and voicemail systems find that large amounts of their time are spent reviewing and responding to messages which are similar in content or relate to the same issue, or are from the same sender but possibly relate to a number of issues. Even in the purely automated world of web servers, multiple individual requests for the same information need to be responded to. While this is not particularly problematic for simple HTML page requests, resources can be drained more quickly when the requests require databases to be queried and pages to be dynamically built in response to each request.